Empty Nest, Full Heart
Untethered Again
When my 18 year old son left for college in September, it marked a significant milestone in our lives. You’re probably assuming that the milestone I’m referring to was his. To be sure leaving his home, friends, and family behind and moving to a new city 6 hours away certainly qualified him for “milestone” status. But hey, this is my blog and I’d prefer to talk about me. This is my empty nest, not his.
My son lived with me for most of his pre-teen and teenage years. He and I became extremely close, enduring cancer (his), job loss (mine), addiction (family member) and the end of love relationships (mine and his). Basically, we were put through the proverbial wringer together and flung out the other end.
So, yeah, packing up his room and dropping him off at college was tough. For me, going back home to an empty house was way tougher.
We spend so much of our lives seeking ways to define ourselves in this world. For me, like most men, that sense of identity came from 3 sources:
My job
My relationship
My fatherhood
By some people’s estimations (not mine), I failed at the first two. My career path has certainly zigged and zagged over the years therefore I haven’t been the kind of financial provider I had hoped to be in my younger years. I’m ok with that now. My marriage failed and subsequent relationships have, too, zigged and zagged, resulting in a limbo state of being “non-attached,” shall we say. My inability to stick the landing on these two means that the last source of identity, fatherhood, has played a disproportional role in who I am and how I see myself.
My own father was a strong yet compassionate man, a product of war-torn eastern Europe and survivor of ethnic German concentration camps. He was many things to his 3 sons, but a “feeler” was not one of them. He was stoic and guarded and taught us that feelings were best kept behind the curtain — even overt expressions of love to his own children.
When I became a father, I made a vow to be a different kind of dad. I would be involved in my son’s life. I would tell my son how much I loved him. I would listen to him and I would share my own feelings. This is how I raised my son. But now, with my son gone, my fatherhood instincts needed to be put to a different use. I now had to learn how to father myself.
The months following my son’s departure left me disoriented. The world seemed smaller. For the very first time in my life, I was untethered. Sure, my son still needs me but it’s much different now — more occasional, more situational. I’m “on call” I guess you could say. I’m not dating anyone — so there’s no one that is a witness to my daily life, and I to hers. These two absences have left a huge void in my life. I never expected it to have such a profound effect on me. It’s been extremely difficult yet tenderly beautiful at the same time.
I see — really see — the parts of me that have been frightened of that aloneness all my life. In the past, I could use the distractions of being a father and husband to avoid looking at myself and seeing the fear. When you’re busy running your kids around town and doing errands and texting your spouse throughout the day, you tend to forget what it’s like in the quietness — in the gaps and spaces of your heart and mind. So I am learning to sit with that emptiness and loneliness and accept it as my birthright. To not push it away but to look right at it and wrap my arms around it. The result is sometimes so painful that I can barely stand it. Other times — and more often so now— I feel compassion for myself and those spaces in me that feel alone and afraid…knowing that we all have them.
I recently sat as part of my Zen meditation practice and found myself flooded with feelings. At first, I wanted to resist thinking that a “true” Zen practice doesn’t give way to feelings. But I let go and wept. I wept like I hadn’t wept in a very long time. I can’t tell you exactly why but all I knew was that something needed to come out. Some part of me needed to be a witnessed, and only I could do the witnessing.
So what I am learning is that no one can truly fill your “empty nest”— not your child, not your partner, not your job…no one. Only you can. When you do that you see the nest isn’t empty at all — it’s incredibly full.
